史蒂文 :: Release 2.0

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

The Google Story arrived in yesterday and i've been reading through it. They've been hugely successful, but from comments and their original goals, and even where they are today, I still think there are huge opportunities and i don't think they will be the last Google.

I can't really inot what I am doing yet, but the comment in the book that PageRank was so powerful because the importance of a link can be determined by how important the site pointing to it is (again recursively determined by how many links point to that and so on), is not wholey untrue, but misses several dimensions from the picture. Their success is an inspiration, but I guess it's an inspiration to put them out of business as no doubt many are trying to do. The inspiration is that the wanted to be the best and ironically that is what will put them second in line at some point in the near future as those who learned from that themselves become the best. And so it will continue. To me the main barrier - or rather then step up that differentiated them - was really the place. More than once i have read about the encouragement and chance meetings and connections they had - probably the key subsctance missing from many competitors around the world at the same time who probably were doing similar things.

Question for me is, can someone from somewhere else take inpiration from the challange of not only beating them, but doing it from somewhere where you don't get the step ups they (and many like them) got. A core belief was that if they created the best search engine then people would come and so would revenue - if that is really true, then being the best anywhere should have the same net effect. We'll see soon enough.

Other things today included Visual Studio 2005 and "MSDN Start-Up Edition" - a suggestion to Microsoft. Oh, and I managed to bluetack a paper wallchart to the wall, allowing me to see the all of the points and the architecture as I type - sometimes the old stuff just works. Picture below ...

The last few weeks have been very, very busy. So i thought things were getting quieter until my position as Judge for the CODiE awards from the Software and Information Industry Associated (SIIA) kicked off. Things had been pretty quiet, but suddenly I have a host of emails, web casts and judging to do.

I had a quick look through the submissions and there are some amazing products and services. In fact the quality in the level of submissions has taken me back a little - far more intense than i expected!

So, I'm judging categories in "Best Application Management Solution", "Best Content Aggregation Service" and "Best Web Services Solution". These are all things pretty close to my heart, so it should make it all the more interesting.